I’m not sure if this is the reason I’m not meant to drink alcohol on my medication, but I swear the handprint is as large as the shadow’s hand, and I do vividly recall that it slapped my ass in the dream.
But that’s all that it was: a dream.
Right?
It must have been a dream. I didn’t make my way to a forest where I was practically mauled by a Faceless Man with moving tattoos and a gigantic shadow while lying on a velvet altar in what looked like a sacrificial circle. I’m only a few miles away from forestry, but I didn’t walk there naked or in a skimpy robe, and I most definitely didn’t drive.
I sprint back to the room, aiming straight for my phone to watch the nanny cam. As expected, half the footage of the night is completely sliced away. One second I’m snuggled up in my robe beneath the sheets, and the next, I’m completely naked with roses blanketing the floor. In the blurry footage, I notice a rolled parchment that slips between my pillows as I sleep.
With my heart caught in my throat, I throw the pillows onto the floor in search of the letter. I jump onto the mattress and lie flat on my stomach as I reach behind the bed, blindly patting the wooden floor until I touch familiar parchment.
My blood vibrates as I fish it out of the darkness, and move to the very edge of the bed near the light.
Keep dreaming of me, my dark love. I’ll be back for more.
Chapter five
Letum
For eons I have been tasked with one thing: Bring souls to the afterlife.
Day after day, night after night, with a single touch from my hand, a soul will pass peacefully and their body will sleep for all of eternity. I have known no other life other than this morbid repetition and passionless existence. For eons I have watched humans, standing to the side and waiting until they inevitably pass.
Because I am inevitable.
Poets have written sonnets about me; composers have written music. Beautiful as they may be, they never amounted to anything more than a moment lost to time.
Until her.
Lilith, my sweet love. She is a dream and a nightmare, merged into one.
I never thought I would find a woman such as her; a woman who can gaze upon death and bring him to his knees. The sight of her, the smell of her, the taste of her, she has made death himself come alive.
Even when fear poisons her blood, I could take a bite out of her and eat the softest flesh. My night monster is perfection, an anomaly in a room of normality, a miracle in the face of wonder. There is nowhere she can run where I will not catch her, nowhere she can hide where I will not find her.
Her soul sings to me like a summer’s breeze: fresh and decadent. I have not been able to get enough of her since the beyond called for her. The afterlife wanted her in its grasp, but I wanted her in mine.
Lilith has called for me in the night, begging and pleading for me to take her soul as I should have. The fates can attest to the wrongness of keeping a soul in the mortal plane long past its time. It is the only way I can make her mine for eternity; she must yearn for me as I yearn for her.
Not death, but me.
I watch her from the corner of the room as she piles the petals together, biting her lip while sporting my marks on her skin. She fists a plastic bag, convinced that she will discard the maroon flora. But she will not throw away something with life until it has decayed into rot. Not because she values life—no, it’s because she values me.
Lilith has become my favorite activity, there is nothing dull about her; I yearn to watch her, taunt her, feel her soft flesh beneath my hands.
I have watched her since the moment I saw her lying on the ground, broken and bruised, begging for me to take her away. I stood by her as machines surrounded her when she lay defeated in a hospital bed. She was calling for me every second. They all thought it was the machines keeping her alive, but it was I that kept her from death.
Despite the bruises that painted her, the cuts that scarred her skin, and the porcelain hue of her face, she was still the most breathtaking vision I had ever seen in all my eons.
I can still remember the first time that her blue eyes found me at the foot of her bed; it was as if the planets had aligned because finally I have found my one true love. The moment I laid my eyes on her, I knew that she was more than the sun and the stars. She was everything, and I was never going to let her go.
Even at the risk of losing it all, I would fall for her. For if I were Icarus and she were the sun, I would still fly to her with my waxen wings. Her beauty would be worth the pain that I would feel just to reach her.
My dark love does not feel either. She barely flinches when she slices her finger open. She does not smile with her eyes nor does she fear walking alone at night. However, she does feel with me; she feels everything. It is clear when her skin flushes before opening her locker and the way she subconsciously bites her lip before unrolling my letter. Even when she shifts her weight reading one of my more illusive notes. I know she longs for me. My night monster only responds to me.
Seeing her wear my mark around her neck pleases me more than I thought it would. The silver symbol glints when it catches the light, making my night monster’s eyes sparkle.
Her phone pings from the kitchen, and she sighs, beelining to the device. I follow behind her, enraptured by the movement of her hips beneath her silk robe. It’s unfortunate that she has decided to put some undergarments on, but she is no less a sight. The slight limp she has makes up for it, a smile etching its way onto my face.
I curl my fingers into fists as soon as I see his name on her phone. Evan. The male who does not deserve her. The only other person that can make her feel, except not in the way she deserves. Every time tears prick her eyes from another one of his comments, is another strike in my ledger.
Evan: Can you transfer money? We’re out of green.
We.
Lilith’s posture deflates when she reads the message. I left her alone with him because I thought my love would see the leech for what he is: a soul sucker. He lives to tear her down just to use her body to help him up. I gave her the space to pull herself away from him, to use me as her crutch, and throw him aside.
I’ve proven to her that I’m all she needs. I can give her money, food, attention, and love, for the rest of eternity.
He can give her nothing but disappointment.
She cringes as she opens her bank account, showing the meager nineteen dollars that are meant to carry her for another four days. I caress her arm as she stares at her phone for so long that the screen goes black, but even then she does not move.
It is selfish of me to refuse her soul and force her to continue living. Perhaps it is selfish of me to continue living in the shadows as she goes through her day with reality nowhere in her mind. I can take her pain away, but I won’t. Not until she decides to live and she chooses to want me, not for what I can give her, but for who I am.
I leave her for a moment to return to her room while she continues to stare blankly at her phone. Shadows morph and flicker in front of me like a ravenous cloud, until a rolled parchment is floating in the middle of the air.
The hard paper is so insignificant in my hand. It is difficult to believe that something so small has the ability to bring out emotions in her so strong that it shakes her soul, be it rage, joy or even fear.